Mrs Hannah Chew, a secondary Maths Tuition teacher who conduct home-based lessons in Yishun wants to talk about her views on online coaching versus face to face lessons. 🙂

I resumed my face to face Yishun secondary maths tuition lessons three days ago. It was liberating. I did not know that simply able to coach my students face to face brings so much joy to me.

I do not think that home-based learning or distance-learning can replace face to face lessons, especially for primary school children and secondary school youth. They need interaction with peers and travelling allow one to unwind too 🙂 ( As long as they are not rushing from one enrichment to the next. )

I guess MOE had the same stand. That is why the PSLE students and the sec 4 students are scheduled to go back to school for revision earlier than the rest. Teenagers and children rarely have the discipline to sit through and listen to pre-recorded lessons.

After 3 months of zoom online lessons, i concluded that online coaching is not as effective as it raved to be. Yes, students cut down on travelling time. But a portion of time online is spend on IT limitations and going round roll-calling who do not understand certain concepts or instructions. Not to mention, IT glitches and connection issues that cause students to log in and out. There was once I have to repeat the same explanation 5 times because some of the students didn’t hear it repeatedly. I am going to be honest. It was so frustrating. And it is a waste of time for the student who caught it at the first instance.

But I have to say, I am proud that the younger generation are adaptable. They are not so sheltered as we thought. Not only did we dive into online coaching within days, some of my students even manage to score better in their online school tests.

By the way, I am a huge fan of https://www.khanacademy.org/ . It is free. And some explanations on some topics are so concise and clear. I even point some of my students to some videos when they need to recap some concepts before doing the practices.

Alternatively, I made some youtube videos on some of the topics that students often asked me to recap. Here is one example. http://hannahtuition.com/proving-amaths-trigo-identities-with-tips-video/

To sum up, nothing can replace human touch. I am so glad that students are back and our lives inch back slowly towards normalcy 🙂